'Revenge' to end after four seasons

Emily Thorne’s quest for vengeance is over: Revenge will end its run after four seasons, EW has learned exclusively.

The upcoming finale, slated to air Sunday, May 10, at 10 p.m. ET on ABC, will serve as the end of the series. “We can officially tell our fans that this will be the end of the story,” executive producer Sunil Nayar tells EW. “We’ve been talking to the network and we all just wanted to make sure that we felt very confident. Now that everybody has seen the finale—which is fabulous—everybody understands that as much as we all adore the show, it has hit exactly the mark it needed to to end. This is the series finale of Revenge that will be airing in a couple weeks.”

Revenge made a splash in its 2011 debut, with 10 million viewers tuning in and a 3.3 in the 18-49 demographic, becoming a strong performer for ABC on Wednesday nights. Eventually, the series was shifted to Sundays and saw a ratings decline in later seasons. A recent outing drew 4.45 million viewers and 1.0.

Longtime viewers suspected that Revenge was coming to an end this season as Emily Thorne, a.k.a. Amanda Clarke (Emily VanCamp), came about as close as she could to realizing her original plan for vengeance against the Grayson family. However, Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) recently killed herself and framed Emily in a last ditch effort to win the battle between them—an act that has landed Emily in jail as the series inches toward the end.

“We certainly had a pitch of how the show could go on, but this is why I feel so grateful to the studio and the network because they also erred on the side of creativity,” Nayar says. “The show is still popular, it’s loved worldwide. I can see why all the arguments from even an economic standpoint to maybe keep it going, but at the end of the day—kind of like they had with Lost—they support creativity above all. They really got the sense with us as their partners that we all came up with a great way to end these stories.”

While Nayar promises closure for fans, “There’s a tiny little cliffhanger in the series finale,” he says. “We don’t want people to get weary of the stories we’re telling, so we felt like they deserve an ending to this novel that Mike Kelley started four years ago. I really feel like the last couple chapters are worthy of the first many.”

Curiously, the cliffhanger may give credence to the theory that the ABC pilotThe Kingmakers, from Revenge writer and producer Sallie Patrick, is actually a spin-off of Revenge. If it’s true, Nayar is playing coy. “There isn’t a whole lot that I can say to that except that Kingmakers is fabulous” he says. “I haven’t had a chance to see it yet, but boy did I love the scripts. It’s got the blood and passion of Revenge hardwired into what the show is, but at the moment, it is not a spinoff in that there’s no characters from this show that are, at the moment, planning on being in that show, but never say never.”

Now the real question is whether Emily Thorne will meet her maker as the series comes to a close. Considering the finale is titled “Two Graves”—a reference to the Confucius proverb—it seems likely that the show’s protagonist won’t get a happy ending. “There are epic emotional moments in the finale,” Nayar says. “There are really shocking things that happen in the finale. It’s a tricky thing because the fans are such passionate lovers of the show and we really want to give them what they want, but the hard part about a finale in a show like this is you want to give them some of what they want, some of what they don’t know they want yet and some of what they never expected, and it needs to be a perfect mix of all those things. I truly believe our finale is the perfect mix of all those three things. I think they’re going to be extremely satisfied.”